Jackie Robinson (47 page)

And indeed, Robinson was once again leading the Dodgers in hitting; by the end of June his batting average was .327, with five home runs and eleven stolen bases. Once again, he was fighting with Stan Musial for the batting crown.

T
HROUGH THE SQUABBLES
and skirmishes of the 1952 season, Jack found a refuge waiting for him at the end of most days at home in St. Albans, which the Robinsons now shared with Rachel’s older brother, Chuck Williams; his wife, Brenda; and their son, Chuckie. At Jack’s direct invitation, the Williamses had migrated from California; he saw them as the essential nucleus of the inner circle of his and Rachel’s friends and supporters, who would make much easier their decision to live in the East. Through Jack, Chuck found a job with Schenley Liquors, where he eventually became a vice-president and, later, a member of the board of directors. In 1952, Brenda, a graduate of Xavier University in New Orleans, arrived from California pregnant with twins; to ease the transition, she and Chuck lived with the Robinsons for about a year. Later in 1952, Jack also invited his best friend and Pasadena Junior College buddy, Jack Gordon, to move east with his wife, Bernice, and their son, Bradley. Gordon would also find work through Jack, first in his clothing store, then with the Manischewitz wine company, where he too enjoyed a long career. Still later, Jack would convince Rachel to invite her mother to give up California and come to live with them.

In 1952, Rachel, too, was pregnant. On May 14, 1952, after the Dodgers lost a game to the Cardinals at Ebbets Field, Jack hurried to Doctors Hospital in Manhattan for the birth of his third child, a boy. Like the pregnancy itself, the delivery was uncomplicated. Rachel and Jack were ecstatic about the birth of their second son, David. She wanted to have at least four children, with as many boys as girls; Jack’s idea of a family was probably even grander. But Jack’s joy soon vanished when Rachel fell sick with nephritis, or an acute infection of the kidney, and had to remain in the hospital for several days. Needing help with David, Jack turned to Florence Covington’s sister Willette Bailey, who gladly took David home to St. Albans.

To Jack’s relief—although her doctor warned her that because of the nephritis, she should probably have no more children—Rachel recovered quickly. Thus, a short time later, he was unprepared when, in St. Louis to play the Cardinals, a telephone call from New York brought troubling news of a medical emergency. Rachel was back in the hospital, awaiting an operation. She had discovered a lump in her breast; a surgeon, diagnosing the growth as probably malignant, ordered surgery as soon as possible. Stunned by the news, Rachel’s main thought was to keep it from Jack. “
I decided that with all he was going through,” she said, “he didn’t need to know about the operation.” But the surgeon insisted. “He asked me right away, ‘Where is your husband? Why isn’t he here?’ We argued a little but then he put his foot down. He wouldn’t operate unless Jack knew about it.”

In St. Louis, Jack hung up the telephone in the hotel room he was sharing with Joe Black and quietly told him that Rachel was ill. “
I think I’m going to go home,” he said. “And when he said that,” according to Black, “water just came down his eyes, right down his cheek.” By the time he reached the hospital he was in a state of nervous tension that only grew worse as the doctors talked to him. “
They scared him to death,” Rachel recalled, “with talk about how tumors have characteristics, about their size, their configuration, their mobility, and how certain factors suggest malignancy. They told him they thought mine did. I didn’t think so, but they did.” Jack took the news hard; he was not at his best waiting to find out the answers to possibly damaging questions. “I would never have told him any of that,” she said. “Jack was badly frightened, because he was never, ever, able to tolerate anything being wrong with me. I had to be there, up and ready and able, managing. Anyway, it turned out to be not a tumor at all. I hadn’t nursed, and the gland formed, became hard, and felt like a tumor. They just took it out and that was the end of it. Jack had been upset for nothing. He had come from St. Louis for nothing. But he wasn’t angry about that. He just had a tremendous sense of relief.”

Some teammates believed that Jack took a long time to recover fully from this scare. By July, although he had some good hitting days, he had slipped into a slump. At one point, he had only two hits in twenty-five at-bats, as his average fell below .300 for the first time since 1948. Astutely, Dressen made the connection between Rachel’s surgery and the slump. “
Before he left the club to see his wife, he was swinging just right,” Dressen pointed out to the press, “and he hasn’t been the same since.” Gradually, however, Jack regained his form, in a reversal of his pattern of previous years. By late August he was back over .300; the Dodgers, behind the excellent pitching of Black and Preacher Roe, held on firmly to first place. Then, with nine losses in twelve games, Brooklyn seemed ready to fold again; but
four straight defeats of the Cardinals set Brooklyn back on course. “
Don’t you worry,” Jack assured a reporter, “we won’t blow our lead this year. We’re going all the way to the World Series. The Giants caught us last year but that won’t happen again.”

It didn’t; Brooklyn won the pennant. Still, disputes continued to dog Robinson’s steps. On August 13, when rain stopped a game between the Dodgers and the Cubs at Ebbets Field, he and Cubs manager Phil Cavarretta started a nasty shouting match conducted from their respective dugouts. The next day brought reports—completely false—that Jack and the Dodgers coach Cookie Lavagetto had to be restrained from punching Cavarretta. As usual, Jack’s denials had little effect on the growing sense that he was out of control. His frustration on this score reached its peak on September 4 in Boston, with an incident that also involved Campanella and two umpires, Larry Goetz and Frank Secory. In the eleventh inning of a tied game, ruling that Johnny Logan of the Braves had been hit by a pitch, Secory awarded him first base even as Campanella angrily insisted that Logan had foul-tipped the ball. When Logan then scored the winning run, Dodger Rocky Bridges bitterly asked Secory if he had shaken Logan’s hand as he crossed the plate. Robinson, too far away to hear the remark, then told Secory: “
What he said goes double for me.” He also told Goetz: “I didn’t hear what he said, but he’s right.”

Acting on the umpires’ complaint, Ford Frick, now the commissioner of baseball, then levied fines of $100 on Campanella and $75 on an incredulous Robinson, who flatly refused to pay up without a hearing. “
Before I’ll pay that fine,” he told reporters, “I’ll take my spikes off and never play another game.” His defiance, practically unheard of in baseball, was not well received by fans. Away from Ebbets Field, the booing of Robinson became intense even as he insisted on his right to a hearing. Apparently, only a trusted reporter’s argument that Jack’s inevitable suspension would be an unfair and perhaps a selfish blow to his teammates led Jack to back down. “
I never thought of it that way,” Robinson told the reporter. “I’ll pay the fine.”

In October, for the third time in Jack’s six Brooklyn seasons, the Dodgers faced the Yankees in the World Series. For the third time, he failed to shine. In 1952, he was as eager as ever to do well. “
The main thing is to beat the Yankees,” he admitted. “But I’d like to come through with one really good World Series, and I know I’m not going to have many more opportunities.” In the first game, Joe Black, after starting only two games all season, shocked the Yankees with a win. After the Yankees took the second, Preacher Roe then won in Yankee Stadium when the usually reliable Yogi Berra let a ball go by and two Dodgers scored in the ninth. Black pitched brilliantly again in the fourth game, yielding three hits and one run over
seven innings; but Allie Reynolds was even better with a shutout. As a hitter, Jack touched bottom in this game; frozen by Reynolds’s wicked curves, he was out three times on called third strikes. (“
I couldn’t argue about them,” he conceded. “The umpire was right in calling them.”) The fifth game went eleven innings before the Dodgers won, but the Yankees then tied up the series. The seventh inning of the seventh game found Robinson with an excellent shot at redemption: he came up to bat with the Dodgers down, 4–2, the bases loaded, and two men out. Redemption almost came. Jack swung hard; the ball skied over the pitcher’s mound; the infielders seemed hypnotized. Then the Yankee second baseman Billy Martin, in a memorable play, stormed in to snatch the ball just before it hit the ground. Once again, the Yankees beat the Dodgers.

Proud to have helped bring another pennant home to Brooklyn, and happy for Black, who became the fifth black player to be named Rookie of the Year in the National League, Jack had performed well once again in Dodger blue. Still, as the season ended he was talking more and more about retiring from baseball. Would he quit? “
I certainly might,” he speculated on the radio in the course of an interview. “There’s no getting around that.… Just say I’m considering it.”

In Meridian, Mississippi, the previous fall, Jack had listened in horror to the reaction of a crowd at a baseball game to the news that Rocky Marciano had just knocked out the aging Joe Louis in a prize fight. To Jack’s sorrow, many people there could feel no sympathy for the fallen former champion, once among the greatest heroes in America. Louis was washed up; he should face the fact and quit. “
It made me stop and think,” Robinson said, “what they might say about me if I started to go on the down grade. Like a good entertainer, I want to leave the stage with the audience asking for more.”

D
ESPITE
J
ACK’S GLOOMY
talk about retiring, there was really no chance in the fall of 1952 that he would voluntarily step aside. Not only did he need his salary; he also knew that his dream of making an even larger impact on the world around him still depended in large part on baseball. He talked about quitting but remained, late in 1952, determined to carry on with the adventure launched in 1945 by Branch Rickey and himself.

At the same time, that fall he branched out further into the business world, this time as a retailer of men’s clothing. On the early evening of December 5, in response to printed invitations, a small constellation of celebrities, including Sugar Ray Robinson, Roy Campanella, and the Hollywood character actor Gabby Hayes (a rabid Dodgers fan), gathered at 111 West 125th Street for the “Grand Opening” of the Jackie Robinson Store. Over the summer, Jack had signed an agreement to do business in Harlem with a Brooklyn businessman, Lou Oster, of Bedford Stores and Bedford Clothiers (of Bedford Avenue in Brooklyn). Jack intended his store to take its place alongside the other major businesses on 125th Street, Harlem’s premier shopping and business strip: the Hotel Theresa, where virtually every important black visitor to New York stayed; Frank Schiffman’s Apollo Theater, the nonpareil center of black musical and comedy entertainment; and
Blumstein’s department store, a retailing fixture in Harlem since at least the 1930s.

Robinson’s name was on the business, but little of his own money was in it. Martin Stone had given only grudging approval to the plan. “
I pointed out to Jack that he didn’t know anything about the retail business,” Stone said; “but he had made up his mind, and he was very excited about the prospect.” Fascinated by Harlem and 125th Street, where he was always welcome at Schiffman’s Apollo Theater, Robinson welcomed a chance to be a part of the black community there. The store also encouraged him to bring out from California his best friend, Jack Gordon. On his last visit to Los Angeles, Robinson had urged Gordon to think of moving east with his family. As the opening of the store drew near, Jack sent a letter to Gordon, air mail and special delivery, inviting him to move to New York to work at the Jackie Robinson Store—in effect, to be his eyes and ears there when Jack was away. “
After the war, I had gone to tailoring school,” Gordon revealed, “so Jack figured I was the man for the job.… Nothing was working out in California, and Jack was Jack, so we came in 1952 and we never left.” The Harlem store was “a really fine shop. Our prices were lower than at the stores downtown, because our overhead was less; but nothing was cheap. The display windows were fantastic. The quality of the clothes was like Jack’s own outfits, conservative but sharp.”

Deliberately, because of his ethics and his pride, Robinson chose not to enter Harlem’s business world selling cheap, inferior clothing at inflated prices to the poorest folk. He hoped his store would add to the quality of life in the community, not prey on it. But if his venture started promisingly, Jack soon faced certain realities about Harlem. Money was a grave problem, perhaps one more serious than he understood; attracting many buyers of quality merchandise would not be easy. Another factor, much harder to pin down, was also at work: would most blacks shop freely at a store owned, supposedly, by a black man, even if that man was Jackie Robinson? Sugar Ray Robinson warned Jack to expect the worst. The fighter’s Harlem bar was well patronized; but his wife’s lingerie shop next door, although well stocked, was not. Becoming aware of a degree of envy and suspicion he had not anticipated, Jack advised his partners not to put his name on garment labels. “Jack used to tell them,” Gordon said, “ ‘I don’t know whether it’s a good idea. You know, some of these people are not exactly in love with Jackie Robinson. They buy where they want to buy. They like thinking of themselves as sophisticated New Yorkers.’ ”